4 Reasons Email Marketing is Essential to Your Digital Strategy

Topics:

Content Marketing

Lead Generation

4 Reasons Why Email Marketing is Essential in any Digital Strategy

Email has rapidly evolved over the decades from an unsaturated, new shiny tool for both consumers and marketers, to a forum for unsolicited spam and is nowadays, often seen as a baron wasteland of unread messages.

Yet, despite the negative perception of emails, there hasn’t been a better time to incorporate email marketing into a digital strategy. When it comes to cutting through the ever-increasing ad noise, reaching your target demographic and, most importantly, driving conversions through a natural sales conversation, email marketing remains an under-utilised tool.

You are 6x more likely to get a click-through from an email campaign than you are from a tweet

81% of online shoppers who receive emails based on previous shopping habits were at least somewhat likely to make a purchase as a result of targeted email

72% people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media

On average, email marketing has an ROI of 3,800%

90% of email gets delivered to the intended recipient’s inbox, whereas only 2% of your Facebook fans see your posts in their News Feed

Simply put, if your business has yet to implement a full email marketing strategy aligned to your marketing funnel, then you’re leaving money on the table.

Email as a platform beats out PPC platforms

Digital campaigns are often at the mercy of algorithm changes, which is the case with popular advertising platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Considering the recent changes in the Facebook algorithm at the start of this year, existing strategies have been flipped upside down and has impacted businesses, brands and advertisers. Nowadays, we cannot simply assume if your target audience is on Facebook, they’ll see your ad or post.

Email is not regulated by third-party algorithm changes at the moment, therefore is the superior channel for customer acquisition. Additionally, and very importantly, it’s inexpensive! Email marketing allows businesses to reach many consumers with literally a few cents per email, significantly lower than the usual CPC rates of other platforms. This makes email particularly attractive for SMBs where every cent counts and research has shown 85 percent of eCommerce businesses consider email marketing one of the most effective customer acquisition tactics.

Content marketing is king, and email is its queen

We know content marketing may be time-consuming and it works. Rather than simply publishing your content on your website, it’s a win-win situation distributing the piece of content to thousands to incentivise immediate action via eDMs. Content marketing and email marketing are a match made in heaven like peanut butter is to jelly – OK, this may be left up to the discretion of taste buds.

You’re also able to kill two birds with one stone by dissecting a new blog post and packaging it for an email format, in order to engage your target demographic without a sales focus. Unlike a standalone website, we can establish a personal rapport with every customer as emails are a direct one to one form of communication, in comparison to blogs where it’s seen as a public space or even blunt advertising for that matter.

Your mailing list is a goldmine

The collection of email addresses is likened to exclusivity and loyalty. The email addresses in your database are your most loyal and dedicated fans, usually with the decision-making power and intent to take action as they’ve given you the consent to correspond with them. This is an important note.

Now, if you have thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of emails in your mailing list who have opted in to hear from you, this opens many doors to nurture them with personalised content and offers, translating into qualified leads or revenue.

Along with the significantly high average open-rate of emails sent to a mailing list, and the desire to hear from your brand or business, a mailing list also provides the opportunity for experimentation and research. Require feedback on a certain product or service? Just ask your mailing list. They’ll be open to indulging with your content, ideas and requests. Just don’t forget to provide value back to your loyal following in the form of valuable content or discounts/offers – it’s a two-way street.

Enables you to segment your data and create nurture flows

Now we understand the importance of a mailing list, it’s a no-brainer to segment and nurture your following. Segmenting your email database is like neatly filing all books in a library by genre. The benefits of segmentation, just like filing books, is profound – it enables macro-targeting, higher open and engagement rates, subscriber retention etc.

Once we’ve segmented the data, lead nurturing is the next strategy in line. It’s the process of engaging the predefined target group by drip-feeding relevant information at each stage of the marketing funnel journey. The aim of this is to proactively move your prospects you’ve gained through your marketing and lead gen efforts, so they ultimately end up as paying and return customers. There’s no better platform to create an ultra-personalised nurture flow than emails.

All in all, even in 2018, email marketing is here to stay, and it is essential it’s part of your digital strategy for the reasons listed above. Additionally, it’s worth noting it’s a trustworthy platform as it’s permission-based, unaffected ad blocking platforms and algorithms, and it’s still extremely effective

If you don’t know where to begin, we can help set you up with the team here and find the perfect email strategy for your business. Give us a call on 02 8310 2393 or contact us here.

Share via

[DISPLAY_ULTIMATE_SOCIAL_ICONS]

by Andrew Zeng

Account Manager

Graduating from the University of New South Wales with Distinction, Andrew has since then become a digital marketing unicorn, worked with multinational companies such as Ogilvy and News Limited, met Bill Gates and starred in music videos.

A jack of all trades, Andrew combines his experience across design, UI/UX, coding, paid and earned advertising to create strategic digital campaigns for brands such as Intel, Transport for NSW and Huawei where he strives to maximise ROI for his beloved clients.

Other than being an overachiever at work, Andrew is a night owl and channels his inner-entrepreneur. He owns various e-Commerce businesses and dabbles in affiliate marketing. During his downtime, he’s travelled over 70 cities around the world, including Thailand where he has trained and competed in Muay Thai. You'll also find him with his acoustic guitars and ukulele playing a casual riff!